Daamon Parker - The Heart of Agile: A new paradigm

schedule 10 months ago

30 Mins

Talk

Beginner

“Agile has become overly decorated. Let’s scrape away those decorations for a minute, and get back to the center of agile.”— Dr. Alistair Cockburn, co-author of the Agile Manifesto.

“When encouraging getting back to the center of agile, I found I kept emphasizing four things:

– Collaborate– Deliver– Reflect– Improve

The nice thing about these four words is that they don’t need much explanation. They don’t need much teaching. With the exception of “Reflect”, which is done all too little in our times, the other three are known by most people. You know if you’re doing them or not.”

Daamon Parker - The Heart of Agile: A new paradigm

schedule 10 months ago

45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Agile has become overly decorated. Let’s scrape away those decorations for a minute, and get back to the center of agile.”— Dr. Alistair Cockburn, co-author of the Agile Manifesto.

“When encouraging getting back to the center of agile, I found I kept emphasizing four things:

– Collaborate– Deliver– Reflect– Improve

The nice thing about these four words is that they don’t need much explanation. They don’t need much teaching. With the exception of “Reflect”, which is done all too little in our times, the other three are known by most people. You know if you’re doing them or not.”

Michele Playfair - Cards Against Agility Game

schedule 1 year ago

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45 Mins

Interactive

Beginner

The Agile version of Cards Against Humanity. You may have seen versions of this on the internet, but rest assured this version has been enhanced to yield a minimum of 156% more awesomeness. Relatively fresh from its stellar debut at the 2017 Xero Unconference!

Ruma Dak - Agile Dojo at MYOB: 6 weeks of Accelerated Learning

schedule 1 year ago

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30 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Starting in November 2017, a crew at MYOB embarked on an exciting 6 weeks journey of an Agile Dojo! Guided by an Agile Coach, it was an intensive learning experience which gave us opportunities to challenge the status quo, carry out various experiments, introduced them to new tools, techniques & practices to foster collaboration, refine team dynamics, bring structure to their approaches and improve the way they worked in general.

We used 'Improvement Kata' and 'Coaching Kata' from Lean Management for learning, adapting, experimenting and coaching. It was a time to pause, observe and ponder over things.

In a nutshell, it was a time-boxed immersive accelerated learning opportunity which resulted in productivity improvements ranging from 10%-90%. MYOB ran this Dojo as an investment in their knowledge workers! It was an experiment run at both Auckland and Melbourne and was successful. This talk will give you glimpses of our 'dojo' adventure, learnings, challenges, interesting surprises and lots of 'aha' moments!

Shripad Taralkar - Adaptive Coaching @ scale

schedule 11 months ago

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30 Mins

Interactive

Advanced

While we talk about rapid change and disruptions, to which we expect todays organisations shall be equipped to respond and adapt to sustain, to me there shouldn't be a second thought in applying the same principles in our professions. As an agility coach, you know there is no one approach that fits for all..

In this talk, I would like to share some of the insights on the coaching moments and how I applied the non purist approach to embed the learnings of the new ways of working. Whilst it is very contextual, I believe it is applicable to many, and share my perspective to adaptive coaching based on the context and dynamics to make it stick.

schedule 11 months ago

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45 Mins

Case Study

Beginner

This interactive session will explore connections and how personal mapping can be scaled to kick-start a platform to build better communications, trust and psychological safety to underpin your agility journey.

schedule 1 year ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Every organisation has legacy systems, and people who know "where the bodies are buried" -- hidden aspects of dependency, communication, process flow and whatnot which every system relies on to function. These are the dirty secrets swept beneath the rug of "business as usual", and they represent risk and friction alike.

As Peter Drucker is famously quoted, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it", and the first step towards measuring it is to be able to describe it. How can you do this with gigantic, complex, intertwined systems whose origins are buried in mystery and legend, whose very operation and continued existence is dependent, frequently, on specific people, high priests who may not want to share their arcane knowledge?

This session provides evidence-based techniques for uncovering this complexity, visualising it in a machine-friendly but fundamentally human-centric manner, and using the results to drive real organisational awareness that facilitates conversations and change.

Chris Chan - Overcoming Your Immunity To Change

schedule 1 year ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

In this session we will cover a brief introduction to the research by Kegan and Lahey where they discovered that behind each of our habits is a strongly held belief that not only keeps us in our groove, but also fights any change that threatens the status quo.

We will discuss why personal growth and increasing our mental complexity is so important for agile and business transformations in today's VUCA world to succeed.

We will create your Immunity To Change Map which is a simple way to bring to light the your personal barriers to change. We will start by outlining your commitment to an improvement goal. Then we will sketche out the things that you are either doing or not doing that prevent progress towards the achievement goal. The Map then identifies competing commitments, as well as the big underlying assumptions behind those competing commitments.

The objective is to pinpoint and address whatever beliefs and assumptions are blocking you from the changes you want to make.

You will leave this workshop with a better understanding and tools to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.

schedule 1 year ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

The Medici Effect was a coined term by Frans Johansson to describe innovation that happens when disciplines and ideas intersect. Take for example the idea of using something very technically challenging such as blockchain, and an internet favourite such as cats and you have the CryptoCats and the Crypto Kitties! Indeed the most interesting ideas are borne out of collaboration & diverse thinking.

This hands-on workshop will provide an introduction to the Medici effect using the Mashup ideation method by IDEO.

The workshop aims to guide the participants on the steps detailed on the Mashup ideation method of IDEO.

Participants will work in groups and will be guided on IDEO's 4 step Mashup process and will end with a Cereal Box design activity and sharing of the created ideas.

schedule 1 year ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Autonomous and empowered teams are a key building block of agile organisations but require a great deal of trust to work. Management and leadership must trust people and teams to do the right thing, and teams need to trust that management will support them when needed.

Transparency is a low-cost means of building trust. Transparency gained through the open sharing of information, particularly visual information, has played a large part in agile and lean thinking - from lean's visual controls, to XP's "big visible charts" and beyond.

We will explore how transparency, and the radiation of information, can build trust and cultures where "safe to fail" is more than a theoretical concept.

Suzanne Nottage - GO WITH THE FLOW: your Scrum teams are interrupted 2,000 times per sprint. Let's talk about flow

schedule 1 year ago

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45 Mins

Interactive

Advanced

Scrum is a great framework but there are many ways to do it poorly. The average IT worker is interrupted every 15 minutes, which equates to 2000+ interruptions for a Scrum team every sprint. Unthinkable on a production line, yet too often the norm in offices.

I conducted original research with Scrum teams in Australia last year as part of my Master of Management thesis (and achieved an A), to understand the causes, patterns and impacts of these interruptions on the team's effectiveness and their happiness. And, how mature teams control interruptions rather than let themselves be controlled by interruptions.

Attendees will play a short game to demonstrate how destructive the context switching from handling frequent interruptions is.

My talks are always highly practical and I provide 3 takeaway actions for teams to improve their 'flow' and reduce interruptions.

schedule 1 year ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Management and managers have not gone away with the advent of Agile.

Old-fashioned carrot and stick management may have worked wonders back in the early days of industrialisation, but is woefully inadequate for undertaking complex knowledge work in an uncertain and volatile world.

At the other extreme, dropping all structure in favour of radical self-management — mocked as "everyone gathering around a campfire singing kumbaya" — doesn't instantly lead to effective coördination, let alone organisational success.

In this workshop we explore the state of the art of management with a mix of design thinking and facilitated discussion to uncover rich insights and perspectives into the nature of management, and what a re-boot could look like.

Aurelien Beraud - Continuous improvement: beyond retros

schedule 11 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

We seem to try to foster a mindset of continuously and relentlessly striving for improvement with mainly one practice: retrospectives have been our default and often only continuous improvement tool for years. I certainly used to think that retrospectives were the most important ceremony and as a coach I used to consider them as my main tool to drive improvement.

However, retrospectives are often disjointed from each other. The insights of one retrospective might be lost right after the end of it or until they are rediscovered in a future one. In addition, if we need to wait for the end of an iteration to look at improving, then can we really talk about continuous improvement?

In this talk, I want to look beyond retrospectives and explore which other tools (Toyota Kata, Improvement Boards, etc.) and other concepts we can inject and explore to foster a continuous improvement mindset. I will present my own journey by sharing experiments I conducted and am planning to carry out, what has worked for me but more importantly what hasn't and where I failed.

Alexandra Stokes - The Future of Work - HR disrupted

schedule 1 year ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

It’s 2018 and Agile working has become the new Way of Working. Once considered the territory of the reckless and sloppy, now most of the free world is considering how they can implement these better ways of working into their teams and orgs.

We've spent many years helping teams move with agility and learn to adapt, to lose low value processes and amplify their performance through these ways of working.

A constant thorn in the side of teams transitioning to these ways of working, is the baggage of OLD ways of working, in particular in Traditional HR processes that plague many teams. Through frustration, we started blogging about the Future of Work where we could ditch concepts like Performance Management Reviews and boxing people into rigid Job Descriptions. We wanted to see if we could spark some interest in trying different approaches that were more aligned to our 'Agile mindset'. For organisational agility can only really be achieved if we truly value individuals and interactions over HR processes and tools.

Our blogs garnered much interest and had companies like REA Group and MYOB reaching out to get involved in How Might We reinvent traditional HR approaches for a workplace of the Future. We even inspired the formation of a Meet-Up in the Netherlands!

Join with us at LAST conf where together we will design a new experiment to Unbox people from the Job Descriptions, and to Free People from the inhumanity of Performance Management reviews.

Darryn Webster - Mythbusting the Agile Mindset

schedule 1 year ago

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30 Mins

Interactive

Intermediate

Agile Mindset is highly talked about and prized amongst agilists. Claims for its benefits range from 10x improvement, can’t be agile without it and requires organisational and cultural change to achieve.

Social psychology presnets a different view where mindset is a cognittive toolkit used to understand and taking action in a complex world. This defintion implies everyone posesses an agile mindset.

Is agile mindset a nirvana state which will enable you to levitate and be at peace with the world? Is it what is constraining everyone from achieving life, love and happiness. Or is it something more practical, humanistic and useful.

Looking through the lenses of behavioural and social psychology we will understand what mindset is, how it works and how you can become more aware of how yours and others mindset are operating within the agile domain.

schedule 11 months ago

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45 Mins

Interactive

Beginner

As organisations have become more agile and try to build “high-performing” teams, they have started to hire for cultural and team fit. As a result they search for people who can collaborate and are team players; who are willing to develop a deep trust in each other and in the team’s purpose; who freely express feelings and ideas; who engage in extensive discussion; who are adaptable and embrace change and who are comfortable managing constructive conflict towards a better outcome.

There are however, many people who do not meet that criteria, and for various reasons, may struggle to meet that criteria in the future.

Everyone brain is wired slightly differently and not everyone’s wiring fits the mould described above.

Does the exclusivity of the above criteria result in certain people missing out who could have significant positive value.

Viktoria Komornik - We have a problem… Can we solve it together?

schedule 11 months ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Being a member of a cross-functional team – such as Front End, Back End, API, UX, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, BA – comes with problems. In this workshop we will gather our problems relating to cross functional teams and form groups to complete simplified A3 Improvement Themes (lean improvement canvas). Our purpose is to clearly identify our problems and the steps which will assist us in tackling these problems.

We will share our experiences and walk away with a set of A3 Improvement Themes complete with the first steps ready to implement at your own workplace the very next day. Personally, I will walk away with a whole lot of Improvement Themes. It’s a win-win